What it is about exactly? If you don’t enter a serial number when you start ColdFusion Builder, you will use the trial version of the full-featured ColdFusion Builder 2.0 for 60 days. After that period, you will automatically switch to a feature-limited – and FREE – Express Edition with only access to basic features such as editor, code assist, and syntax highlighting. POINT: no  hover help, code insight, quick fix, code formatting, etc… for you. Sniff…

You’re missing all those great features? At any time, purchase a valid license and enter the serial number to unlock a fully powered ColdFusion Builder 2.

Personally I applied to do some French translations and I greatly encourage you to do so in your native language, if not English of course! Just apply here.

My main computer at Home is a Windows 7  64bits machine (no bad joke already please…) that is really running well… until 3 weeks ago: on this PC, I installed a mandatory anti-virus, lots of Adobe software and development tools, some games, a huge photo library (about 8000) etc… nothing bad at all you would say, but one day my wife was just opening Skype when some nasty messages started to pop-up.

“COM Surrogate has stopped working”

“Access violation …. in module ntdll.dll ….”

“Program X has stopped working”

My first reaction was WTF!?! Then I started to try to understand what was happening exactly, which program could cause the trouble…but messages were so explicit, and I had no luck with Google this time, that I finally gave up and decided to go for a fresh install.

During my re-installation process, the problem happened again (Oh my…) but this time, as there were less programs installed and I had a better luck with Google, I found out that it was the latest update of my anti-virus that was causing the problem That piece of software was running fine for years until that damned auto-update! I was very disappointed, frustrated and about to uninstall this program forever.

But thinking twice, I remembered that such problems had happened already several times (maybe not that bad…), with several different software and different OS (maybe some of you remember my MacOS  X failure in a middle of a talk…).

Moral of the story: Consumers, beware auto-updates – Vendors, please try to better test your updates before pushing them live to avoid dramatic situation.

PS: for the record, my anti-virus is Avast and their latest update (5.1.899) seems to break some Win 7 64bits machine but not all of them. A workaround is to disable the behavior shield which seems to be the faulty part.

]]> http://cyrilhanquez.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=974 5 http://cyrilhanquez.com/blog/?p=961 http://cyrilhanquez.com/blog/?p=961#comments Tue, 01 Feb 2011 22:56:59 +0000 Cyril H. http://cyrilhanquez.com/blog/?p=961 I’m proud to announce that I’ve been renew as an  Adobe Community Professional for 2011: I’m very excited again this year as I have a tremendous amount of ideas, but first I want to give a big THANK YOU to Adobe and especially the Community Team – Liz, Rachel, Magda, Aaron and John (hope I didn’t miss anyone but several names should be added to that list for sure…).

This year there is also a new Community Program called Adobe Community Champions: you can read more about it and the difference with the ACP program here. I’m very happy to see a lot of familiar names in both programs, congrats to all of you! You can consult the full list of the group members following the links below…

Adobe Community Professionals

Adobe Community Champions

Have you ever tried to convince your co-workers to adopt a new development technique, your boss to buy a new product? Maybe you succeeded/failed or were too afraid of even trying ? Did you understand what you did wrong or right?

Terry Ryan wrote this book to help you to identify the kind of people you have in front of you by putting them in group of skeptics (The Uninformed,The Irrational, The Boss, etc…) and giving some hints and techniques on how to counter their arguments and put them on your side. I was smiling while reading the first chapters as I was thinking about my own experience and how it could really fit in the patterns that Terry defined in his book. I was really interested to read about the techniques to counter them (Gain Expertise, Create Trust, Propose Compromise, Build a Bridge, etc…) and could clearly understand now that when I failed it’s because I was not enough prepared – yep, convincing people can be a long journey! What I like also in this book is that it makes you think about your own motivations also: Why do I want that change?  Is it solving a real problem? At the end you will get an overall strategy that could sound simple, but “simple does not mean easy”.

So it’s definitively a book I recommend to anyone who wants to make “things move forward at his workplace” (by using better tools or techniques) but is not sure how to succeed. Maybe success won’t be there at the end, but this book will guide you in the right direction!

]]> http://cyrilhanquez.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=948 7 http://cyrilhanquez.com/blog/?p=944 http://cyrilhanquez.com/blog/?p=944#comments Mon, 10 Jan 2011 22:45:31 +0000 Cyril H. http://cyrilhanquez.com/blog/?p=944 First of all I want to wish a Happy New Year to the people who are still reading my blog… sorry for the low number of posts in 2010 (despite the high level of excitement), but it was definitively not my best year for many reasons so no recap of 2010 for me. Hopefully if you’re following me on twitter, you knew that I was still alive (and yes twitter is making me a lazy blogger!) Nothing to worry about, I enjoyed the conferences that I attended, networking (always nice to meet “old” friends again and get new ones, contacts with the Adobe Community Team…), the excitement around mobile development for Android (Flex mobile and AIR), the upcoming tablets (who said PlayBook?) etc…

My 2011 resolutions? I prefer not to put anything here yet, I’m usually not good at keeping them I can only tell that my blog need a serious lifting and that I will think how to make our CFUG a bit “stronger”. That’s it for my first post of 2011, Cheers!

Well, Andy Allan and Matt are currently discussing the idea of a User Group or Workshop tour on the same topic: so they need some feedback from the community and are asking you to fill in a very quick and simple survey.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/oopcf

Thanks in advance!

Serge Jespers, an Adobe Platform Evangelist and longtime Flash enthusiast, will present “Flash Platform on devices”: Learn how to build multi-screen applications with the Flash Platform tools and runtimes. Serge will show you multiple applications running on multiple devices and talk about how they were built.

Guust Nieuwenhuis, consultant for I.R.I.S. Solutions & Experts s.a./n.v., and developer at the European Commission, will present “Developer introduction to MURA CMS”: Do you know what MURA CMS, an open source ColdFusion based Content Management System, can do for you as a developer? Get yourself introduced to MURA, its architecture, its event model, its API, its extension possibilities and be ready to get started!

WHEN:
November 25, 2010 at 6:30 PM

WHERE:
Adobe Offices Benelux
Culliganlaan 2F
1831 Diegem
Belgium

PROGRAM:

18h30: Flash Platform on devices.
19h45: Developer introduction to MURA CMS.
21h00: Free drinks and networking

The event is free of charge, but seats are limited. Make sure you register quickly!

One thing I’m excited about is the arrival on the market of tablet devices and, of course, being able to develop for them I’m not sure yet what is their target demography: so far I’m seeing it more for early “geek” adopters, frequent travelers maybe… but with RIM/BlackBerry entering the market in 2011, it could change everything because their name is usually associated with business - talking about names, in my opinion the device name “PlayBook” is a huge contrast with the image of the brand itself. As an enterprise application developer and with the BlackBerry PlayBook, I can now imagine a tablet entering the enterprise world and run corporate applications.

Let’s have a look at some of the specifications:

• 1 GHz dual-core processor
• 1 GB RAM
• True multitasking
• Powerful, user-friendly QNX technology
• Dual HD video cameras
• Micro USB and Micro HDMI
• Full Adobe® Flash® 10.1 enabled
• Built-in support for HTML 5
• 7″ LCD display, 1024 x 600 screen resolution
• 4 points Multi-touch capacitive screen
• Wi-Fi® 802.11 a/b/g/n
• Supports POSIX OS, SMP, Open GL, BlackBerry® 6, WebKit, Adobe Flash, Java® and Adobe AIR 2.5 for development

Quite impressive, no? As you can read, as an ActionScript developer YOU can also create Applications!

*** WHERE TO START? ***
BlackBerry Tablet OS Application Development section of the BlackBerry website

There you will be able to download the BlackBerry Tablet OS SDK Beta for Adobe® AIR and the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ Simulator for both Mac and Windows. Have a look also on Adobe Labs.

*** WATCH THE WEBCAST SERIES ***
available on the BlackBerry Tablet OS Developement Resources section of the BlackBerry website

*** EXPERIMENT ***
and ask any questions on the BlackBerry Tablet OS SDK for Adobe AIR Support Forums Board

And there’s one thing that you don’t want to miss: the free BlackBerry PlayBook tablet offer! To make it short, develop and have an application accepted in the BlackBerry App World (Official Store for BlackBerry Apps) before the official launch of the tablet, somewhere Q1 2011, and get a free PlayBook. More detailed information will be posted very soon.

I hope a lot of you will give it a try. Myself, I will do some experimentations and will share them with you!

I sadly have to miss the Adobe MAX conference this year Thanks to the live streaming of the 2 keynotes (BTW peer to peer in the Flash Player 10.1 worked very well), numerous tweets, blog posts and you can always watch the recording of all sessions on the dedicated Adobe TV channel - this year the conference was definitively focused on mobile development (AIR for Android, Tablets, Google TV) which is really exciting.

As far as I know, there was few or no information on ColdFusion X but you can have a look at this ColdFusion Builder 2 “Storm” Sneak Peak (Blog post from Ray Camden - video from Tim Cunningham). Don’t be too disappointed, just read one of the last tweet from Adam Lehman “Got approval on our plans for Link! Its go big our go home time for #ColdFusion. Adobe management said “GO BIG!!!”"

So in the next coming weeks, expect more blog posts from me (hopefully) with some experimentations on mobile development.

5 stages of a blogger’s life by Alex Hughes and Paul Bradshaw

]]> http://cyrilhanquez.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=870 0